9/11: Truth, Trutherism, and Truthiness
The morning of 9/11, when the alarm went off with National Public Radio’s Carl Kasell talking about planes flying into the World Trade Center, I was convinced I’d stumbled into a modern-day War of the Worlds. And that unreal feeling didn’t lift for the rest of that day—not when I got to the virtually empty Mother Jones office (there were still all those reports of more planes in the sky), not when I saw ex-CIA head James Woolsey on TV, already talking about how Saddam Hussein had to be behind this.
Nor, really, did it lift for another seven years. These were the years when we were served up lie after lie, when doubt became treason and reality itself grew increasingly preposterous. (We had a 21-year-old private from West Virginia do what?) Even the accounting, when it finally began, came not over the substance of what had happened, but focused on oddly procedural sideshows (did Scooter Libby out Valerie Plame Wilson? Did we really care, when the point was that Dick Cheney stovepiped intelligence to con the nation into war?) They were the years of truthiness—of claims just plausible enough to be believed, of accurate details gathered into deceitful conclusions, and of course of reporters who truthfully reported the lies they were told.
This is the first 9/11 anniversary when the country is no longer being run by those who so cynically exploited horror and legitimate anger. We have repudiated torture (though we’ll still send detainees to be tortured elsewhere on our behalf). We are withdrawing from Iraq, and will withdraw from Afghanistan sooner or later; most importantly, perhaps, we have elected a president who reminds the world that America is more than Gitmo and Predator drones.
But the end of the Bush era is not the end of the 9/11 era. There were deeper historical currents that made both the attack and its exploitation possible, and they still run strong.
Remember the poll that appeared around the fifth anniversary—revealing that one-third of Americans believed the government engineered the attacks or deliberately let them happen? Really, it wasn’t that surprising. At a time when both government and media were giving Americans ample reason for distrust, it wasn’t such a leap to conclude that the official story was not to be believed. The corollary to truthiness, its opposite and logical partner, was trutherism.
Trutherism is an expression of one of those deeper trends—the growing belief that no deed is too heinous, no deception too extreme, for the evil overlords in our government. It’s the legacy, at least in part, of the 60s and 70s, of Vietnam, J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate. It is also the belief that animates the birther and death-panel conspiracists of 2009: Of course the government would lie, cheat, and kill your grandmother. Why do you ask?
This is the world we live in post-9/11, and post Iraq War; a world where for many people, “the other side” has become so repugnant that nothing seems beneath it. We are no longer interested in understanding the people we disagree with; we just want to defeat them, for the good of the nation.
Which is where we come back to the events of 9/11. What made the horror of that day possible, in part, was the belief of 19 men that their adversaries were so dark and monstrous as to justify the mass murder of innocent people. And no, I’m not comparing anyone to Mohammed Atta. I’m saying that the seeds of evil are alive—however dormant—in most humans. (Germany, where I was born, found that out most catastrophically.) And we feed these seeds each time we act as if our adversaries weren’t worthy of basic respect, compassion, engagement. That is the truth of 9/11. Or at least one of them.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Mother Jones - 9/11: Truth, Trutherism, and Truthiness
Joe Kloc - The Evolution of Evolution
The Evolution of Evolution
Visualization / by / September 10, 2009
Ben Fry has created a tool that allows you to watch the theory of evolution evolve. Here, he introduces us to his amazing exploration of scientific thought.
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces. Click to launch »
In November 1859, Charles Darwin published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, in which he introduced the world to his theory of evolution. Since its first edition, the book has undergone considerable edits and revisions.
Last week, Ben Fry, director of Seed Visualization and its research arm, the Phyllotaxis Lab, released a new tool, called The Preservation of Favoured Traces, which allows users to watch the book evolve across six editions as Darwin reconsidered his arguments and responded to criticisms. Fry’s visualization shows how scientific theories themselves are not static truths, but living ideas that are constantly evolving as new evidence comes to light. Seed spoke with Fry to learn more about his new project and what future he sees for visualization tools.
Seed: Why visualize the evolution of On the Origin of Species? What do you hope to accomplish?
Ben Fry: I spoke to a Darwin scholar about this project and she asked me the same question. “Why do this? We already know what all this stuff looks like,” she said. But by “we,” she meant the community of Darwin scholars that have access to all of this fascinating stuff. We wanted to get it out to a larger audience. People are curious about Darwin’s ideas and what his theory meant.Furthermore, people are frequently under the impression that scientists know everything and that scientific theories are fixed. Within science, however, the opposite is true. Scientists know that the more that they find out, the more questions they will have. By showing how the text of The Origin… changed over time, we are visualizing how scientific ideas evolve.
Seed: What were the main challenges you faced when you first began the project?
BF: Finding the data set was certainly a big issue. In fact, when the idea came about a couple years ago, digitally transcribed versions of all of the editions of the book weren’t yet available. The Darwin Online folks actually did all the work of transcribing the texts and creating a very nice archive.Also, developing visualizations with text and language is very different than working with numerical data. It’s more about sentence construction and the function of language. There is a shocking amount of work that goes into corralling that sort of data into something useful. The book is 150 years old, so I can’t just use a current dictionary.
Seed: Will this tool enable further research?
BF: One interesting thing you can see from the visualization is that over the course of Darwin’s edits he included more and more responses to people’s criticisms of his theory. Finally, in the sixth edition, published in 1872, he actually just took all of those scattered references and made them into their own chapter where he addressed them directly. This shows a shift in his approach to presenting his theory. Prior to the sixth edition, he had tried to stay out of that fray and rely on his network of friends to defend his ideas.This particular project was really about being able to open up the domain of intense scholarship and render it accessible to a general audience. Visualizations engage people in research by giving them something they can actually play with and imagine. People connect to it. I’m working on a bigger piece right now that will serve as more of a tool for researchers.
Seed: How will the bigger piece be different?
BF: Users will be better able to compare subtle edits made to each edition—sort of Darwin with “track changes” turned on. For instance, there are places where Darwin increased or decreased stress on a particular idea, or backed away from certain points. We’ll add annotations, and it’ll become something historians and students can use.Seed: This seems like a very scientific approach to historical research.
BF: It is. And to that end, I think we are about to see a whole lot more work like this. In the next few years we are going to have a lot more people doing work around text-based visualizations. We have really turned a corner with regards to the amount of text that is actually available for us to work with. One of the things that caught the eye of the creators of IBM’s Many Eyes—a website that provides users with data visualization tools—was that far more people were interested in creating text-based visualizations than numerical-based ones. An astonishing number of people really relate to them.Seed: Looking forward, what other text-based visualizations are you planning to develop?
BF: I’m curious about how language changes over the course of a century or even in just five or ten years. There are a lot of things that get inserted into the language, like the way that people talk about things and frame issues. I don’t want to get into particular project ideas though, because I think it sort of jinxes me when I do.
Tags:
SciAm Mind - The ultimate hack: reverse engineering the human brain
The ultimate hack: reverse engineering the human brain
By Larry Greenemeier in 60-Second Science Blog
When hackers want to break into a computer system, they often attempt to reverse engineer the operating software to better understand how it works (and, of course, its vulnerabilities). While researchers have for years taken a similar approach to better understanding parts of our gray matter, neuroscientists now say that within a decade it will be possible to create a digital model that replicates all functions of the human brain.
Though the brain has trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes, scientists have already begun to build detailed models of the mouse, rat, cat, primate and human brain, says Henry Markram, director of neuroscience and technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute (BMI) in 2002. One of the keys to furthering this work is cooperation among scientists who are gathering together fragments of information collected over the past century about the how the brain works.
Such a model would reside on a supercomputer, allowing researchers to test theories about the brain and better understand how electrical-magnetic-chemical patterns in this mysterious organ convert into our perceptions. "We think we see with our eyes, but in fact most of what we 'see' is generated as a projection by your brain," Markram said in a statement. "So what are we actually looking at when we look at something ‘outside' of us?"
A better understanding of the brain could help doctors better treat brain diseases while reducing the number of animals required to conduct lab research. "There is no brain disease for which we really understand what has gone wrong in the processing, in the circuits, neurons or synapses," according to Markram, whose BMI Blue Brain Project has since 2005 been building simulations with the help of IBM supercomputers that reverse-engineer the brain at the molecular and cellular levels. Their ultimate goal is to model the entire brain.
Blue Brain isn't the only effort to reverse engineer the brain. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research arm, last year gave the IBM Almaden Research Center $4.9 million for a project called "SyNAPSE," an attempt to reverse-engineer the brain's computational abilities to better understand its ability to sense, perceive, act, interact and understand different stimuli. Although the brain is still not well understood, "there is enough quantitative data for us to be able to begin putting together the pieces," Dharmendra Modha, IBM Almaden's director of cognitive computing, said earlier this year at an event celebrating the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) 125th anniversary. Modha predicted that by 2018 computers will be able to simulate the workings of the human brain.
In Scientific American's 2008 Special Report on Robots, Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc., proposed that the fastest way to reverse engineer the brain may be to study the real thing. One condemned killer has already allowed his brain and body to be scanned, Kurzweil points out, and all 15 billion bytes of the now-digitized inmate can be accessed on the National Library of Medicine's Web site. Another option, according to Kurzweil: microscopic robots (or "nanobots") injected into the bloodstream and programmed to explore every capillary, monitoring the brain's connections and neurotransmitter concentrations.
Image: Activity in the brain's neocortex is tightly controlled by inhibitory neurons shown here, which prevent epilepsy (© Blue Brain Project; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
TED Talks Rebecca Saxe: How brains make moral judgments
Sensing the motives, beliefs, feelings of loved ones and strangers is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions.
Young Adults Turning to Meditation to Deal with Stress
Being young, here, now
Meditation groups say cyber generation is looking inward to counter stress
Colleen Cary and others meditated during a retreat last month for those 18 to 32 years old at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre. (Christine Peterson for The Boston Globe)
BARRE - Nestled in the woods of this small town, 96 young adults recently gathered at a quiet mansion for a weeklong sojourn, away from buzzing cellphones, humming iPods, and the myriad callings of human and cyber civilizations.Keeping even the most basic forms of communication, like speaking and writing, to a minimum, they meditated in silence, practicing vipassana, or insight meditation, an ancient Buddhist technique that involves focusing one’s attention on the present, on the breath, mind, and body.
“It was just meditate, eat, sleep,’’ said Kestrel Slocombe, 19, a student at Vermont’s Bennington College who spends much of her time rushing to class, worrying about a novel she’s writing, and painstakingly planning her days, sometimes weeks in advance.
“It was almost like being a child, she said. “You didn’t have to put together a puzzle of a complicated day.’’
At a time when homework or job pressures and the likes of Facebook and Twitter compete for attention throughout the day, meditation groups say an increasing number of young adults are signing up for retreats and classes, seeking a temporary escape, a haven to reconnect with their thoughts.
“Young people are much more stressed out than people 20, 30 years ago,’’ said Rebecca Bradshaw, one of the retreat leaders who also works as a psychotherapist. “We have a fast-paced and alienating culture.’’
Since the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist nonprofit, introduced the retreat specifically for 18- to 32-year-olds in 2004, the number of young adults attending to practice vipassana has steadily risen, said Bob Agoglia, the organization’s executive director.
This year’s retreat attracted more applicants than ever from 16 states, he said, and for the first time the group had to turn away more than a dozen applicants.
The Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, a nonresidential nonprofit, has also seen a stream of curious young adults at its weekly vipassana, or “mindfulness,’’ meditation sessions for beginners, said Peggy Barnes Lenart, the center’s operations coordinator.
Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy, a community for agnostics, atheists, and the nonreligious, started a free, open-to-all group this year that practices different forms of meditation, including Buddhist and Quaker, said Zachary Alexander, 26, the group’s founder. Half of its nearly 30 members are under 32, he said.
“It’s something that people find can be a break from their stressful lives,’’ said Alexander, who considers himself an atheist.
“It can be something that leads to personal insight.’’
While traditional Quaker meditation emphasizes hearing divine messages, the humanist meditators focus on impulses toward love and truth, and try to accept the events of their lives to gain greater inner calm, said Alexander, a lab administrator at the Harvard Center for Brain Science.
Joshua Beckmann, 28, of Allston, who practices insight meditation, said he enjoys the flexibility Buddhist teachings provide.
“No one’s asking me to profess anything or asking me to call myself Buddhist,’’ said Beckmann, a public health researcher at Boston University who was raised Catholic. “I really appreciate the opportunity to explore.’’
The benefits of meditation, supported by scientific research, might attract younger populations, according to Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital who conducts meditation research.
Lazar said her team recently studied the brains of about 30 adults - some as young as 18 - before and after they underwent an eight-week insight meditation course.
The results showed that in most participants, the portion of the brain that responds to fear, anger, and stress - the amygdala - became smaller. In animals, the amygdala has been shown to get larger in stressful situations, Lazar said.
About a year ago, the Center for Health Promotion and Wellness at MIT Medical began offering stress-reduction classes that incorporate meditation, said Lauren Mayhew, a program manager at the center.
“A lot of people have a hard time going from their frenetic lives to sitting still,’’ Mayhew said, noting that the classes, discounted for students, tend to fill up on the first day.
“The really crucial age is mid- to late-20s,’’ she said.
“That’s when students wake up and realize that they are mortal beings and that their bodies are affected by stress.’’
Some are drawn to meditation out of sheer curiosity about how their lives might change both during and after meditation.
Angela Borges, 26, a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at Boston College, turned to insight meditation about two months ago, though she was skeptical of its tangible benefits.
Many have told her she looks much happier, she said.
“I’m running around crazy but there’s just a little part of my attention . . . that sort of says ‘Look what’s happening, notice how I’m living.’ It’s just opened up this new way of being.’’“I actually have a sense of empowerment,’’ she said.
Dave Munger - Mimicry at the Molecular Scale
New biological research has revealed mimicry at the molecular scale that could have profound implications for medicine and industry.Molecular Mimicry
Research Blogging / by / September 9, 2009
Courtesy of John D.
Many of us were first introduced to natural mimics in high school biology class via lessons about the viceroy butterfly, which uses its near-perfect resemblance to the poisonous monarch butterfly to escape predators, or crafty hoverflies, insects that look like bees or wasps, sans nasty sting. But these seemingly harmless examples belie the more sinister functions mimicry serves in the natural world. For instance, ant-mimic spiders prey on other spiders’ babies, scaring the parents off by taking on the appearance and behavior of much more menacing ants.
A July study led by Stephen McMahon describes another less-heralded type of mimicry, a biochemical forgery that can have potentially deadly consequences even for humans. “Dr. Jim,” a research scientist whose blog, Mental Indigestion, strives to “make science more digestible,” explained the research in a blog post last month. This mimicry takes place at the molecular level, when a bacteriophage (a virus that preys on bacteria) known as Tn916 attacks its victims. Normally bacteria are able to defend against the foreign DNA of bacteriophages by attacking and breaking it into pieces. But Tn916 creates a protein that has a similar structure to the bacterium’s own DNA, which means the unlucky microbe cannot mount a defense without damaging itself in the process.
The protein mimic is strikingly compact and elongated, unlike most proteins. It even possesses a hint of a helical structure, just like DNA. When the invading protein’s acidic groups (highlighted in red in the top portion of the figure below) are superimposed on the bacteria’s DNA (the DNA is red and white; the superimposed protein is green and yellow), they match the DNA structure almost perfectly. This clever disguise allows the Tn916 bacteriophage to exploit bacteria’s reproductive systems for its own reproduction. Dr. Jim says the researchers have now identified six additional bacteriophages possessing a similar ability to mimic bacterial DNA. Though such adaptations are apparently rare, they could still present a danger to humans, as they may spread rapidly through ecosystems and promote the emergence of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
The Tn916 bacteriophage protein (top) resembles bacterial DNA, allowing Tn916 to hijack bacterial cells. At bottom, the green-and-yellow Tn916 protein is superimposed over red-and-white bacterial DNA to highlight their similarity. Image courtesy of James Naismith and David Dryden.
But if nature can play at this mimicry game, humans can, too. One thing natural chemical systems do much better than artificial ones is to catalyze, or speed up, chemical reactions. Honed by eons of natural selection, enzymes in cells hasten processes that would otherwise require thousands of years to occur on their own. What if human scientists could duplicate the structures of enzymes and utilize that power to make their own more efficient catalysts? Michael Clarkson, a post-doc who divides his blogging time between video games and biochemistry, uncovered two papers from David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington that document how to do just that.
In one case, Clarkson says, the researchers sped up the Kemp elimination, a process that opens a benzene-ring-like structure in a complex organic molecule. Reactions like this are the building blocks of organic chemistry, allowing researchers to convert one molecule into another and eventually build larger molecules, including drugs and other useful substances. In this case, the researchers actually created an artificial enzyme to mimic a structure frequently found in nature, the TIM barrel. The reaction using the artificial enzyme was faster than the unassisted reaction, but was still much slower than the reaction enabled by a natural enzyme.
To boost the artificial enzyme’s performance, the team borrowed another trick from nature: They used in vitro evolution, creating randomly varied versions of the manufactured enzyme and promoting the versions that worked best. They ended up with a robust version that improved the speed of the unaided reaction by a factor of 106, a million-fold increase. It’s still not quite as efficient as the best natural enzymes, but it’s an impressive feat nonetheless.
These studies didn’t get a lot of mainstream media coverage, and I’d submit it’s not because they don’t describe important work. The fact is, molecular biology is a difficult subject to convey to the general public. By necessity it’s laden with jargon, and in many cases a PhD is necessary to even have a hope of understanding the raw scientific papers. Properly squeezing such complexity into a minute-long television news story or a 250-word news article is very difficult, if not impossible. That’s why it’s critical for bloggers like Clarkson and Dr. Jim to share this work with the world, in-depth, but ideally still in a way most folks can understand. You can find much more about molecular biology at ResearchBlogging.org.
Dave Munger is editor of ResearchBlogging.org. He also blogs at Cognitive Daily. Each week, he writes about emerging trends in research from across the blogosphere.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Two Articles on Perfectionism
Here are two older articles from Psychology Today on perfectionism - an issue many people deal with. If one sees it as a "part" that is trying to manage our behavior, and that has our best interests in mind, it becomes easier to work with, but that's another article.
What flavor of perfectionist are you? It matters!
Perfectionism comes in at least two flavors
Perfectionism comes in at least two flavours: adaptive and maladaptive. The maladaptive flavor seems to have social roots. (Take the self-test at the end of the post.)
We've been discussing personality traits and procrastination in the last couple of blog entries, but these have been considered at the highest level of the personality trait taxonomy. Today, I want to consider a lower-order trait, perfectionism. It's not formally part of the Big-Five personality traits that we've discussed.
It was originally assumed, as the diagram implies, that perfectionism undermines our action; all perfectionism was seen as maladaptive. It's not that simple. Perfectionism is multi-dimensional, or there's more than one flavor.
My focus today is on a relatively recent study reported by Jeffrey Kilbert (Oklahoma State), Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling and Motoko Saito (University of South Alabama). They report on adaptive and maladaptive aspects of self-oriented versus socially-prescribed perfectionism. In doing this, they summarize key aspects of the literature. Let me begin by defining some terms.
Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett developed a multidimensional perfectionism scale with three subscales or types of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially-prescribed. Here's a brief description of each:
Self-oriented perfectionists: Adhere to strict standards while maintaining strong motivation to attain perfection and avoid failure; engage in stringent self-evaluation.
Other-oriented perfectionists: set unrealistic standards for significant others (e.g., partners, children, co-workers) coupled with a stringent evaluation of others' performances.
Socially-prescribed perfectionists: believe that others hold unrealistic expectations for their behavior (and that they can't live up to this); experience external pressure to be perfect, believe others evaluate them critically.
Of the three, my focus will be on self-oriented and socially-prescribed perfectionism as these have shown different relations with measures of procrastination in past research, and they are differentially related to what has been labeled adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. (If you're interested in other-oriented perfectionism, I'd recommend reading "The no asshole rule" by Robert Sutton as there is quite a bit of overlap here, I think).
Conceptually, perfectionism had been considered a maladaptive trait overall. It didn't matter what form it took, perfectionism was seen to be detrimental (hence the figure I chose for this blog entry). However, another multidimensional perfectionism scale developed by Randy Frost revealed two underlying dimensions for his six subscales of perfectionism: concern over mistakes, personal standards, parental expectations, parental criticism, doubting of actions and organization. These two broad dimensions of perfectionism were labeled: positive strivings and maladaptive evaluation concerns.
In terms of Hewitt and Flett's three types, Frost found that the broad "positive strivings" dimension was related to self- and other-oriented perfectionism, as well as his own subscales of high standards and organization. Frost's research also demonstrated that positive strivings was related to increased positive emotions and it was not correlated with depression.
The second broad dimension of maladaptive concerns was related to Hewitt and Flett's socially-prescribed perfectionism, as well as Frost's own subscales of concern over mistakes, parental criticism and expectations, and doubts over actions. This dimension of maladaptive concerns was found to be related to higher levels of negative affect (emotions) and depression, and other research has shown that maladaptive concerns (socially-prescribe perfectionism) is related to procrastination, depression, suicidal ideation, lower self-esteem, anxiety, loss of self-control and shame.
In sum, there is some clear evidence that perfectionism is not one maladaptive flavour, and that a key distinction is between what we can see as perfectionism set by self and perfectionism imposed, or prescribed, socially. Given this past research, Kilbert and his colleagues wanted to explore the extent to which self-oriented perfectionism might be related to other adaptive traits such as self-esteem, perceived self-control and achievement motivation. At the same time, they wished to further explore the potential negative associations with socially-prescribed perfectionism
Their Research
Kilbert and colleagues used a battery of measures with a sample of 475 students. As you might expect given the concepts listed above, they measured things like perfectionism, self-esteem, achievement tendency, depression, anxiety, shame, guilt and procrastination. In their analyses, they also distinguished "types" of perfectionists in an unique fashion. They created types by using scores for both self-oriented and socially-prescribed perfectionism in combination. This resulted in four possible types: Low-Low (low on both forms of perfectionism), Self-oriented perfectionism only, Socially-prescribed perfectionism only and finally high on both scales. You can see that this 4-type continuum basically goes from not perfectionistic at all to having high scores on both types of perfectionism.Their Results
Given the variety of groupings and variables, it's not surprising that their results varied. Because the blog is about procrastination, I'll simplify things by keeping my focus on this aspect of their results. As they summarize the findings, "Regarding procrastination, results indicated that SOCIALLY Prescribed ONLY participants reported a tendency to procrastinate more than SELF Oriented ONLY and Generally Perfectionistic participants. Additionallly, Non-Perfectionistic students procrastinated more than did the SELF Oriented ONLY participants" (p. 152).I find this very interesting, of course, as it clearly delineates socially-prescribed from self-oriented perfectionism in relation to procrastination. Not only do individuals who report higher socially-prescribed perfectionism procrastinate more, but individuals who are described as self-oriented perfectionists actually procrastinate less than non-perfectionists! Clearly, at least in terms of procrastination, there are adaptive and maladaptive forms of perfectionism.
And, just because it helps round out the story, I want to add that the results of this study also revealed that self-oriented perfectionism was associated with higher levels of self-control and achievement motivation, whereas socially-prescribed perfectionism was associated negatively with self-esteem, self-control and achievement motivation, and this maladaptive form of perfectionism was significantly related to higher levels of depression, suicide proneness, anxiety, shame and guilt. The distinction between these two types of perfectionism is very clear.
The implication of these findings for perfectionism and procrastination
Here is how Kilbert and colleagues make sense of the results overall.Self-oriented Perfectionists
". . . self-oriented perfectionists are those who derive a sense of pleasure from their labors and efforts, which in turn enhances their self-esteem and motivation to succeed and eventually helps them to develop a sense of control over their environment. Self-oriented perfectionists may then use their pleasure in their accomplishments as encouragement to continue and even improve their work" (p. 154).Socially-prescribed perfectionists
"In contrast, socially prescribed perfectionists may be compared to neurotic perfectionists [a term originally coined by Hamachek] in that they do not derive pleasure from their labors and efforts and tend to view their work as inadequate or inferior. Furthermore, they report experiencing external pressure and or coercion to accomplish tasks. Therefore, the maladaptive symptoms of the socially prescribed perfectionist emerge not from an internally felt desire to be their best, but more from a fear of failure and/or a desire to avoid embarrassment, shame and guilt" (p. 154).So, what kind of perfectionist are you? It seems to make a big difference!
How do you know if you're a perfectionist? Check out Psychology Today tests to learn more. This 44-item test will give you personal feedback for your overall perfectionism score. If you want specific feedback for each of the three types of perfectionism discussed in this blog entry, there is a fee (Note: This is not my test, and I am not promoting its use. I'm simply making you aware of this option if you want to know more).
Reference
Kilbert, J.J., Langhinrichsen-Rohling, J., & Saito, M. (2005). Adaptive and maladaptive aspects of self-oriented versus socially prescribed perfectionism. Journal of College Student Development, 46, 141-156.
Other papers
Hewitt, P.L., & Flett, G.L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60. 456-470.Frost, R.O., Heimberg, C.S., Holt, C.S., Mattia. J. I., & Neubauer, A.L. (1993). A comparison of two measures of perfectionism. Personality and Individual Differences, 14, 119-126.
Here is the 2nd article.
Pitfalls of Perfectionism
You could say that perfectionism is a crime against humanity. Adaptability is the characteristic that enables the species to survive—and if there's one thing perfectionism does, it rigidifies behavior. It constricts people just when the fast-moving world requires more flexibility and comfort with ambiguity than ever. It turns people into success slaves.
Perfectionists, experts now know, are made and not born, commonly at an early age. They also know that perfectionism is increasing. One reason: Pressure on children to achieve is rampant, because parents now seek much of their status from the performance of their kids. And, by itself, pressure to achieve is perceived by kids as criticism for mistakes; criticism turns out to be implicit in it. Perfectionism, too, is a form of parental control, and parental control of offspring is greater than ever in the new economy and global marketplace, realities that are deeply unsettling to today's adults.
"I don't understand it," one bewildered student told me, speaking for the five others seated around the table during lunch at a small residential college in the Northeast. "My parents were perfectly happy to get Bs and Cs when they were in college. But they expect me to get As." The others nodded in agreement. Today's hothouse parents are not only over-involved in their children's lives, they demand perfection from them in school.
And if ever there was a blueprint for breeding psychological distress, that's it. Perfectionism seeps into the psyche and creates a pervasive personality style. It keeps people from engaging in challenging experiences; they don't get to discover what they truly like or to create their own identities. Perfectionism reduces playfulness and the assimilation of knowledge; if you're always focused on your own performance and on defending yourself, you can't focus on learning a task. Here's the cosmic thigh-slapper: Because it lowers the ability to take risks, perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation—exactly what's not adaptive in the global marketplace.
Yet, it does more. It is a steady source of negative emotions; rather than reaching toward something positive, those in its grip are focused on the very thing they most want to avoid—negative evaluation. Perfectionism, then, is an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.
No one knows this better than psychologist Randy O. Frost, a professor at Smith College. His research over the past two decades has helped define the dimensions of perfectionism. This, he's found, is what perfectionism sounds like:
"If someone does a task at work or school better than me, then I feel like I failed the whole task."
"Other people seem to accept lower standards from themselves than I do."
"My parents want me to be the best at everything."
"As a child, I was punished for doing things imperfectly."
"I tend to get behind in my work because I repeat things over and over."
"Neatness is very important to me."
Each statement captures a facet of perfectionism:
Concern over mistakes: Perfectionists tend to interpret mistakes as equivalent to failure and to believe they will lose the respect of others following failure.
High personal standards: Perfectionists don't just set very high standards but place excessive importance on those standards for self-evaluation.
Parental expectations: Perfectionists tend to believe their parents set very high goals for them.
Parental criticism: Perfectionists perceive that their parents are (or were) overly critical.
Doubting actions: Perfectionists doubt their ability to accomplish tasks.
Organization: Perfectionists tend to emphasize order.
By itself, having high standards (or being orderly) does not impale a person on perfectionism; it is necessary, but not sufficient. "Most people who are successful set very high standards for themselves," observes Frost. "They tend to be happy." What turns life into the punishing pursuit of perfection is the extent to which people are worried about mistakes.
Concern with mistakes and doubts about actions are absolute prerequisites for perfectionism. Perfectionists fear that a mistake will lead others to think badly of them; the performance aspect is intrinsic to their view of themselves. They are haunted by uncertainty whenever they complete a task, which makes them reluctant to consider something finished. "People may not necessarily believe they made a mistake," explains Frost, "they're just not quite sure; they doubt the quality of their actions." Intolerance for uncertainty characterizes obsessive compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, too.
But it's only paralyzing in the presence of parental criticism and exacting expectations. It's one thing to strive for perfection, another to demand it. "Overly demanding and critical parents put a lot of pressure on kids to achieve," says Frost. "Our studies show that is associated with perfectionism." It's transmitted in subtle ways. There's a modeling effect, so that parents who are obsessively concerned with mistakes raise children who are, too. And there's an interpersonal effect, transmitted by an authority figure in a child's life who is overly critical and demanding.
Read the rest of the article.
Buddhist Geeks - Episode 137: Artificial Wisdom
Buddhist Geeks - Episode 137: Artificial Wisdom
We're back again with Artificial Intelligence researcher and Zen-dabbler, Ben Goertzel. We continue our exploration of some of the major themes in his non-fiction story "Enlightenment 2.0". This precipitates a conversation about whether consciousness is a result of the mechanisms of the brain, or whether it is fundamental. And connected to that, what are the ethical implications of creating an artificial intelligence, if we do indeed see it as having BuddhaNature?
Finally, Ben shares what he has discovered while exploring the notion of "artificial wisdom"--including what difference there is between intelligence and wisdom. He also talks about the seeming incompatibility between intense scientific thinking and enlightenment, and how that might be rectified by creating a more wise and intelligent super-mind.
This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Enlightenment 2.0.Related Links:
Tags:
Thanissaro Bhikkhu - The Joy of Effort
The Joy of Effort
The path doesn’t save all its pleasure for the end. You can enjoy it now.
Explosions in the Sky, David Poppie, 2007, mixed-media collage, 24 x 24 in.WHEN EXPLAINING meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician’s tuning of a lute. Reading the mind’s needs in the moment—to be gladdened, steadied, or inspired—is like a palace cook’s ability to read and please the tastes of a prince.
Collectively, these analogies make an important point: Meditation is a skill, and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rahula: “When you see that you’ve acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way—conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others—take joy in that fact and keep on training.”
Of course, saying that meditation should be enjoyable doesn’t mean that it will always be easy or pleasant. Every meditator knows that it requires serious discipline to sit with long, unpleasant stretches and untangle all the mind’s difficult issues. But if you can approach difficulties with the enthusiasm with which an artist approaches challenges in her work, the discipline becomes enjoyable. Problems are solved through your own ingenuity, and the mind is energized for even greater challenges.
This joyful attitude is a useful antidote to the more pessimistic attitudes that people often bring to meditation, which tend to fall into two extremes. On the one hand, there’s the belief that meditation is a series of dull and dreary exercises, allowing no room for imagination and inquiry: simply grit your teeth, and at the end of the long haul your mind will be processed into an awakened state. On the other hand, there’s the belief that effort is counterproductive to happiness, so meditation should involve no exertion at all: simply accept things as they are—it’s foolish to demand that they get any better—and relax into the moment.
While it’s true that both repetition and relaxation can bring results in meditation, when either is pursued to the exclusion of the other, it leads to a dead end. If, however, you can integrate them both into the greater skill of learning how to apply whatever level of effort the practice requires at any given moment, they can take you far. This greater skill requires strong powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, and if you stick with it, it can lead you all the way to the Buddha’s ultimate aim in teaching meditation: nirvana, a totally unconditioned happiness, free from the constraints of space and time.
That’s an inspiring aim, but it requires work. And the key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation. Instead of formulating a cut-and-dried method, he first trained his students in the personal qualities—such as honesty and patience—needed to make trustworthy observations. Only after this training did he teach meditation techniques, and even then he didn’t spell everything out. He raised questions and suggested areas for exploration in the hope that his questions would capture his students’ imagination, so they’d develop discernment and gain insights on their own.
We can see this in the way the Buddha taught Rahula how to meditate. He started with the issue of patience. Meditate, he said, so that your mind is like the earth. Disgusting things get thrown on the earth, but the earth isn’t horrified by them. When you make your mind like the earth, neither agreeable nor disagreeable sensory impressions will take charge of it.
Now, the Buddha wasn’t telling Rahula to become a passive clod of dirt. He was teaching Rahula to be grounded, to develop his powers of endurance, so that he’d be able to observe both pleasant and painful events in his body and mind without becoming engrossed in the pleasure or blown away by the pain. This is what patience does. It helps you sit with things until you understand them well enough to respond to them skillfully.
To develop honesty in meditation, the Buddha taught Rahula a further exercise. Look at the inconstancy of events in body and mind, he said, so that you don’t develop a sense of “I am” around them. Here the Buddha was building on a lesson he had taught Rahula when the boy was seven years old. Learn to look at your actions, he had said, before you do them, while you’re doing them, and after they’re done. If you see that you’ve acted unskillfully and caused harm, resolve not to repeat the mistake. Then talk it over with someone you respect.
In these lessons, the Buddha was training Rahula to be honest with himself and with others. And the key to this honesty is to treat your actions as experiments. Then, if you see the results aren’t good, you’re free to change your ways.
This attitude is essential for developing honesty in your meditation as well. If you regard everything—good or bad—that arises in the meditation as a sign of the sort of person you are, it will be hard to observe anything honestly at all. If an unskillful intention arises, you’re likely either to come down on yourself as a miserable meditator or to smother the intention under a cloak of denial. If a skillful intention arises, you’re likely to become proud and complacent, reading it as a sign of your innate good nature. As a result, you never get to see whether these intentions are actually as skillful as they seemed at first glance.
To avoid these pitfalls, you can learn to see events simply as events and not as signs of your innate Buddha-ness or badness. Then you can observe these events honestly, to see where they come from and where they lead. Honesty, together with patience, puts you in a better position to use the techniques of meditation to explore your own mind.
THE PRIMARY TECHNIQUE the Buddha taught his son was breath meditation. The Buddha recommended sixteen steps in dealing with the breath [see bottom of page]. The first two involve straightforward instructions; the rest raise questions to be explored. In this way, the breath becomes a vehicle for exercising your ingenuity in solving the problems of the mind, and exercising your sensitivity in gauging the results.
To begin, simply notice when the breath is long and when it’s short. In the remaining steps, though, you train yourself. In other words, you have to figure out for yourself how to do what the Buddha recommends. The first two trainings are to breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body, then to calm the effect that the breath has on the body. How do you do that? You experiment. What rhythm of breathing, what way of conceiving the breath calms its effect on the body? Try thinking of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs but as the energy flow throughout the body that draws the air in and out. Where do you feel that energy flow? Think of it as flowing in and out the back of your neck, in your feet and hands, along the nerves and blood vessels, in your bones. Think of it coming in and out every pore of your skin. Where is it blocked? How do you dissolve the blockages? By breathing through them? Around them? Straight into them? See what works.
As you play around with the breath in this way, you’ll make some mistakes—I’ve sometimes given myself a headache by forcing the breath too much—but with the right attitude the mistakes become a way to learn how your perceptions shape the way you breathe. You’ll also catch yourself getting impatient or frustrated, but then you’ll see that when you breathe through these emotions, they go away. You’re beginning to see the impact of the breath on the mind.
The next step is to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshing fullness and a sense of ease. Here, too, you’ll need to experiment both with the way you breathe and with the way you conceive of the breath. Notice how these feelings and conceptions have an impact on the mind and how you can calm that impact so the mind feels most at ease.
Then, when the breath is calm and you’ve been refreshed by feelings of ease and stillness, you’re ready to look at the mind itself. You don’t leave the breath, though. You adjust your attention slightly so that you’re watching the mind as it stays with the breath. Here the Buddha recommends three areas for experimentation: Notice how to gladden the mind when it needs gladdening, how to steady it when it needs steadying, and how to release it from its attachments and burdens when it’s ready for release.Sometimes the gladdening and steadying will require bringing in other topics for contemplation. For instance, to gladden the mind, you can develop an attitude of infinite goodwill or recollect the times in the past when you’ve been virtuous or generous. To steady the mind when it’s been knocked over by lust or to reestablish your focus when you’re drowsy or complacent, you can contemplate death, realizing that death could come at any time and you need to prepare your mind if you’re going to face it with any finesse. At other times, you can gladden or steady the mind simply by the way you focus on the breath itself. For instance, breathing down into your hands and feet can really anchor the mind when its concentration has become shaky. When one spot in the body isn’t enough to hold your interest, try focusing on the breath in two spots at once.
The important point is that you’ve now put yourself in a position where you can experiment with the mind and read the results of your experiments with greater and greater accuracy. You can try exploring these skills off the cushion as well: How do you gladden the mind when you’re sick? How do you steady the mind when dealing with a difficult person?
As for releasing the mind from its burdens, you prepare for the ultimate freedom of nirvana first by releasing the mind from any awkwardness in its concentration. Once the mind has settled down, check to see if there are any ways you can refine the stillness. For instance, in the beginning stages of concentration you need to keep directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating and adjusting it to make it more agreeable. But eventually the mind grows so still that evaluating the breath is no longer necessary. So you figure out how to make the mind one with the breath, and in that way you release the mind into a more intense and refreshing state of ease.
As you expand your skills in this way, the intentions that you’ve been using to shape your experience of body and mind become more and more transparent. At this point, the Buddha suggests revisiting the theme of inconstancy, learning to look for it in the effects of every intention. You see that even the best states produced by skillful intentions—the most solid and refined states of concentration—waver and change. Realizing this induces a sense of disenchantment with and dispassion for all intentions. You see that the only way to get beyond this changeability is to allow all intentions to cease. You watch as everything is relinquished, including the path. What’s left is unconditioned: the deathless. Your desire to explore the breath has taken you beyond desiring, beyond the breath, all the way to nirvana.
But the path doesn’t save all its pleasures for the end. It takes the daunting prospect of reaching full awakening and breaks it down into manageable interim goals—a series of intriguing challenges that, as you meet them, allow you to see progress in your practice. This in and of itself makes the practice interesting and a source of joy.
At the same time, you’re not engaged in busywork. You’re developing a sensitivity to cause and effect that helps make body and mind transparent. Only when they’re fully transparent can you let them go. In experiencing the full body of the breath in meditation, you’re sensitizing yourself to the area of your awareness in which the deathless—when you’re acute enough to see it—will appear.
So even though the path requires effort, it’s an effort that keeps opening up new possibilities for happiness and well-being in the present moment. And even though the steps of breath meditation eventually lead to a sense of disenchantment and dispassion, they don’t do so in a joyless way. The Buddha never asks anyone to adopt a world-negating—or world-affirming, for that matter—frame of mind. Instead, he asks for a “world-exploring” attitude, in which you use the inner world of full-body breathing as a laboratory for exploring the harmless pleasures the world as a whole can provide when the mind is steady and clear. You learn skills to calm the body, to develop feelings of refreshment, fullness, and ease. You learn how to calm the mind, to steady it, gladden it, and release it from its burdens.
Only when you run up against the limits of these skills are you ready to drop them, to explore what greater potential for happiness there may be. In this way, disenchantment develops not from a narrow or pessimistic attitude but from an attitude of hope that there must be something better. This is like the disenchantment a child senses when he or she has mastered a simple game and feels ready for something more challenging. It’s the attitude of a person who has matured. And as we all know, you don’t mature by shrinking from the world, watching it passively or demanding that it entertain you. You mature by exploring it, by expanding your range of usable skills through play.
16 STEPS OF BREATH MEDITATION
1 Breathing in long, one discerns, “I’m breathing in long;” or breathing out long, one discerns, “I’m breathing out long.”
2 Or breathing in short, one discerns, “I’m breathing in short;” or breathing out short, one discerns, “I’m breathing out short.”
3 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body.”
4 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out calming bodily fabrication” [the in-and-out breath].
5 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out sensitive to refreshment.”
6 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out sensitive to ease.”
7 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication.”
8 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out calming mental fabrication.”
9 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out sensitive to the mind.”
10 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out gladdening the mind.”
11 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out steadying the mind.”
12 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out releasing the mind.”
13 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out focusing on inconstancy.”
14 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out focusing on dispassion.”
15 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out focusing on cessation.”
16 One trains oneself, “I’ll breathe in and out focusing on relinquishment.”
—From Majjhima Nikaya 62, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Thanissaro Bhikkhu is abbot of Metta Forest Monastery, outside of San Diego. He is the author of a series of books on meditation—Meditations, Meditations2, and Meditations3—available for free at accesstoinsight.org.
image: © DAVID POPPIE, COURTESY OF PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Eliezer Sobel - The Tribal Embrace
The 99th Monkey
One man's spiritual quest—and his continuous and utter failure to find the answers.September 6, 2009The Tribal Embrace
I spent last weekend in a very deep workshop that provoked a lot of tears and feelings, both of which are often in short supply for me. It was a "5-RhythmsTM"-based group, the healing-through-movement practice developed by Gabrielle Roth, a work that I have been engaged with, on and off, for 30 years, (and lately, I also teach it.) Gabrielle is currently dealing with a serious health issue, so I send her prayers of healing and love and offer this missive as a testimony to what she has given the world.
In Gabrielle's work, the dance floor is a metaphor for our lives, and thus what goes on there can be as complex, messy and exhilarating as the rest of life. While on the surface, the 5 Rhythms may seem to be about dance, movement is merely the vehicle for a powerful, healing process of meditation-in-motion, aimed at unifying the body, heart, mind, soul and spirit into our original wholeness, and addressing our collective cultural disease of fragmentation, or what Gabrielle has called "trizo-phrenia": thinking one thing, feeling another, and doing a third. In this particular weekend, I experienced and expressed a deep well of grief throughout the four days—primarily around the inevitable loss of my parents and everyone else I love, the unthinkable sufferings of the world at large, and my personal and private litany of unfulfilled dreams and dashed expectations I had for myself as a young man.
But I quickly recognized and remembered that I am not a special case; there were as many wounded hearts in the room as there were people, and our leader—the wondrously talented Andrea Juhan—
kept reminding us that although we each have our personal and unique histories, we also share a greater field of unified awareness, one that includes all of our individual hurts, all of our betrayed, crushed or terrified hearts, all of our disappointments, loss, rage and grief. (Sound like a fun workshop so far? Fear not: underneath and alongside the pain we also collectively entered an exquisite field of profound beauty, the deep joy of loving connection, our bodies and hearts dancing wild and free.)
Then, with only a few hours to go in our time together, a young man in the group suddenly received word that his father had just died.
His first overwhelming impulse was to leave the group immediately and grieve alone. But a gentle coaxing from several of the participants and staff brought him back into the room and onto the dance floor, completely shattered, and completely supported. Never in my 30+ years of being both a workshop attendee and leader have I experienced a group so instantly and dramatically let go of their own self-preoccupations and drop down seven layers into a tangible and collective well of grief and love, surrounding and bearing witness for our fellow participant.
When I worked as a lay hospital chaplain, I learned that it is a holy and sacred occasion to sit with someone at the time of their passing; on this occasion, we learned as a group that it is equally profound to be with someone experiencing their first wave of utter loss, shock and sorrow at hearing the news of a beloved's death. The man e-mailed our group several days later, saying "I almost walked away and isolated myself from the greatest gift I have ever received."
How often in our time of greatest need do we choose to completely withdraw, and attempt to deal with our inner turmoil privately, waiting until we have put our messy insides together sufficiently to be "presentable" enough to gingerly make social contact again? We each received a profound lesson from this man, about responding to deep pain and vulnerability another way, a way of remaining present to unbearable suffering, while allowing that raw, naked place within to be seen and tenderly held by others.
Earlier in the weekend, Andrea had asked us to "Enter the space within you that loves to dance," and I heard myself thinking, "I don't love to dance. I do it because I think it is good for me, kind of like going to the gym. But love it? My hip is killing me, my arthritic toes hurt, I can't keep up with the 20-year olds—who loves that?" As our shells cracked, however, and all of us walking-wounded began peeking out of our inner, private worlds of separation and pain, I began to remember what I DO love about the dance: connection. The magic on the dance floor (remember, dance floor=life) primarily occurs for me when I drop into my essential Self and deeply connect with others, in this case through a non-verbal, moving exchange of essence and energy. That's where the love is.
And that's also where the hurt can be, so we all tend to proceed with great caution when approaching another's world. Dare we toss caution to the winds and risk being seen? If we drop our masks and stand naked and emotionally vulnerable before another, will we still be loved and accepted? Can we release the habitual presentation of our social personas and stand inside our authenticity and connect from there?
When we are able to do these things, something magical happens; the world shifts, and becomes a much friendlier place, one that can welcome and hold whoever we happen to be, without our habitual and often unconscious obsession with trying to change or fix who we are in the hopes of pleasing some imaginary jury and gaining their love, acceptance and approval.
What if all of who we are, just as we are, was not only sufficient, but loveable, mysterious and ultimately an empty, clear vessel of Divine transmission-in-action? That recognition, when embraced, instantly transforms us from someone who is constantly looking for love (in all the wrong places), into a beacon of light, someone able to freely dole the love out. As Gabrielle used to intone in the early days, "You have to give to live." The spiritual path is never about getting something, despite all of our efforts to do so. St. Francis made it very simple: "Let me not so much seek to be loved, (and understood) as to love, (and understand)."
I remember a poignant and profound moment with Ram Dass, several years after a stroke had temporarily robbed him of his former verbal lucidity, and it was almost as if he had been forced to become a poet, to express himself in only a few words instead of the two-hour entertaining lectures for which he had always been famous. We happened to find ourselves together in a tiny meditation room at the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, he in his wheelchair, me on the floor, and we shared a moment of silently gazing into one another's eyes. Then, as his attendant began to wheel him out of the room, he simply commented, "Every individual, like a flower," and I burst into tears, feeling the purity of my "flower-self" seen and acknowledged in a way that I never even recognize in myself, let alone another. And yet, when all is said and done, we are all co-existing in a great, beautiful and multi-colored, infinite field of...well, yes, flower-children! (It is the anniversary of Woodstock, after all!) May all beings water, weed and tenderly care for our shared, global garden, and may you, Gabrielle, get well soon and resume your work as a Master Gardener.
Tags:
Vitamin D Is the New Fish Oil
The Vitamin D molecule
If you aren't supplementing with vitamin D, you should be - and a lot more than most people might suggest. I have been taking between 3000 and 4000 iu a day for a few months now, and I have noticed an increase in muscle mass and fat loss without changing anything in my diet. Now the changes aren't huge, like on drugs, but they are noticeable and have resulted in bigger weights and more recovery.There are lots of other good benefits as well, as this article from T-Muscle reveals.
"D" is for Doping
by Chris Shugart
"D" is for Domination
In 1927 a controversy arose in the athletic world.
The German Swimmers' Association had decided to use a sunlamp on their athletes to boost performance. Some felt this ultraviolet irradiation constituted "athletic unfairness."
In other words, doping.
How could sitting under a sunlamp be construed as doping? Because, according to Dr. Tim Ziegenfuss, this artificial sunlight penetrates the skin and converts cutaneous 7-dehydrocholesterol to previtamin D3, which in turn becomes 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D in the kidneys.
That in itself might not constitute athletic unfairness, but if you're deficient in Vitamin D (which is pretty damn common), then modern studies have shown that it can indeed be a performance enhancing substance.
The irradiation of athletes has continued since.
Fast forward to May 2009, a headline in the Post Chronicle:
"Vitamin D May Allow American Olympians To Dominate In 2012"
This headline was a reaction to a new paper published by The American College of Sports Medicine on the positive effect of adequate Vitamin D on athletic performance.
Now, although some scientists, including Dr. Tim Ziegenfuss, would not classify Vitamin D as a hormone, its metabolic product (calcitriol) is a secosteroid hormone (a molecule that's very similar to a steroid). In fact, many come right out and classify Vitamin D as a steroid hormone.
But is this really doping?
Most experts agree that it's not.
The majority of athletes — like the majority of people in the general population — are deficient in Vitamin D. Treating this deficiency can help athletes prevent stress fractures as well as maintain a healthy vitality. If this also happens to improve the athlete's reaction time, muscle strength, speed, and endurance, well... that's just a very nice side effect of getting adequate Vitamin D.
So Vitamin D has been making waves in the athletic community since at least 1927, but it's also becoming a hot topic in another field: life extension. Add to this some evidence that it could help with fat loss and strength gains, and you just might have...
The Next Big Vitamin
Dr. Jonny Bowden calls Vitamin D the most underrated "vitamin" on the planet. (Quotation marks because it isn't technically a vitamin at all.)
Dr. Ziegenfuss, a researcher and sports nutritionist to elite athletes, tests himself often to make sure he's getting enough. He even tests his kids for it and supplements them as needed.
Coach Eric Cressey says Vitamin D might just be the next fish oil. He makes sure the athletes under his care get plenty of it. Charles Poliquin does the same.
And finally, medicinal chemist Bill Roberts says that you should "absolutely" be taking Vitamin D.
What about the stuffy and often behind-the-times nutritional organizations and agencies? Well, the FDA has stated that they're likely going to up their Vitamin D recommendations the next time they release new standards.
In October of 2008, the American Academy of Pediatrics doubled the amount of D they recommend for kids (from 200 IU per day to 400 IU per day). And the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Wyoming has recommended that sports nutritionists assess levels of Vitamin D in their athletes. If they're getting too little, they contend it will compromise the athlete's ability to train.
From government agencies to in-the-trenches trainers, the trend is clear: Vitamin D is important. And if you think you're getting enough of it from natural foods, fortified foods, and sunlight, then think again, Sunshine.
Vitamin D: Why Should You Care?
Three reasons: Longevity, performance, and lookin' good naked.
Let's break those down:
1) Longevity
You know what really gets in the way of building muscle, losing fat, and benching a ton?
Death.
The New England Journal of Medicine recently warned that the number of diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency is growing. And who's deficient? Most people, the studies seem to be saying, including otherwise nutrition-conscious athletes and gym rats.
In one mind-blowing study (Melamed, et al.) using population data, researchers found that total mortality was 26% higher in those with the lowest 25(OH)D levels compared with the highest. And a meta-analysis of 18 randomized controlled trials found that supplemental vitamin D significantly reduced total mortality. That means quite simply this: vitamin D supplementation prolongs life.
Here's just a handful of examples:
• According to the Vitamin D Council, current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer.
• Vitamin D may protect against both Type I and Type II diabetes.
• Low D may contribute to chronic fatigue, depression, and Seasonal Affective Disorder.
• Parkinson's and Alzheimer's sufferers have been found to have lower levels of D.
• Low levels of vitamin D may contribute to "Syndrome X" with associated hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
• Administration of dietary vitamin D has been shown to lower blood pressure and restore insulin sensitivity.
This section could go on endlessly, so let's just say this: If you care about living a good long life, then Vitamin D looks like it could certainly help with that goal.
2) Performance
Studies on Vitamin D, sunlight, and performance go back for decades. Russian studies in the 1930's showed that 100M dash times improved in irradiated athletes vs. non-irradiated athletes undergoing the same training (7.4% improvement vs. 1.4%).
German studies in the 1940's showed that irradiation lead to a 13% improvement in performance on the bike ergometer vs. no improvement in the control group.
In the 1950's researchers saw a "convincing effect" on athletic performance after treating athletes at the Sports College of Cologne. Findings were so convincing that they notified the Olympic Committee.
At one point, even school children were irradiated and given large doses of Vitamin D in 1952 Germany. Treated children showed dramatic increases in overall fitness and cardiovascular performance. UV radiation was also shown to improve reaction times by 17% in a 1956 study.
In the 1960s, a group of American college women were treated with a single dose of ultraviolet irradiation. The results: improvements in strength, speed, and endurance.
Other studies showed "distinct seasonal variation" in the trainability of musculature. Basically, athletes performed better and got stronger in the late summer due to their greater exposure to the sun and subsequent Vitamin D production.
Vitamin D has also been shown to act directly on muscle to increase protein synthesis. Deficient subjects administered Vitamin D showed improvement in muscle protein anabolism and an increase in muscle mass.
Improvements in neuromuscular functioning have also been seen. People with higher levels of Vitamin D generally have better reaction time and balance.
3) Looking Good Naked
If Vitamin D does indeed improve the effects of training and helps to stave off various illnesses, then it's easy to see how this can translate into an improved aesthetic: you're healthier, you feel better, you get more out of your training, and you end up looking better when you make sexy-time. But there could be a more direct effect as well.
Dr. Shalamar Sibley's new research shows that adding Vitamin D to a reduced-calorie diet may lead to better, faster weight loss. Not only did she find that excess body fat came off faster when plenty of D3 was present, but it also came off the abdominal area.
The icing on the cake? The same D-supplemented subjects retained muscle mass while losing the fat.
In other studies, subjects receiving Vitamin D therapy lost weight, lost their sugar cravings, and saw a normalization in blood sugar levels.
The Quick and Dirty of D
Before we get to the TMUSCLE recommendations, let's review some Vitamin D basics and some little known facts:
• There is no RDA for Vitamin D due to "insufficient evidence." But there is an AI or Adequate Intake recommendation:
Ages 19-50: 200 IU
Ages 51-70: 400 IU
Over age 70: 600 IUThat means this is the amount assumed to ensure nutritional adequacy: sufficient to maintain bone health and normal calcium metabolism in healthy people. Suffice it to say, these are bare minimums that new evidence suggests are way too conservative.
• There aren't that many foods in nature containing Vitamin D. The best source is halibut liver oil, followed by cod liver oil, salmon, tuna, and mackerel.
And by the way, farm-raised salmon has been shown to have 25% less Vitamin D than wild salmon. And cod liver oil? Good source of D but also high in Vitamin A, which can be toxic if over-consumed. Do NOT use cod liver oil alone to boost your Vitamin D intake!
Beef liver, cheese, and egg yolks contain a smidge. Foods like milk do contain Vitamin D but only because manufacturers add it in, i.e. fortified milk, fortified cereal etc. Milk was fortified back in the 1930's to combat rickets, and it worked.
Despite all of this, those who wish to maximize the benefits of a higher Vitamin D intake wouldn't be able to get enough through food sources alone. And of course a lot of that "fortified" food is still make-you-fat food, probably avoided by most physique athletes.
• Most people get their D through sunlight. The basic intake guidelines are: 5-30 minutes of sun exposure between 10 AM and 3 PM at least twice a week without sunscreen. But much depends on where you live, the pollution levels, cloud cover, age, the season of the year, your natural cutaneous melanin content, etc.
Another factoid: While it's technically possible to get too much Vitamin D, you can't get too much from the sun, only from over-supplementing.
• What about tanning beds? The "moderate use" of commercial tanning beds that emit 2-6% UVB radiation can help, but of course there's that whole skin cancer thing to consider.
• Sunlight that comes through glass doesn't count. Most UVB radiation doesn't penetrate glass, corner-office boy.
• If using the sun to get your D, remember that cholesterol-containing body oils are critical to the absorption process. Some experts say that because the body needs 30 to 60 minutes to absorb these vitamin-D-containing oils, it's best to delay showering for about an hour after sun exposure. And don't jump right into the pool either as these natural oils can be stripped by chlorine.
How Much Vitamin D?
In researching this article, I looked to find a consensus among the experts. Here's what I've found:
• As a general rule, Dr. Clay Hyght recommends 1,000 IU per day. This represented the low end amongst our experts, but note that it's still way over current government guidelines.
• Canadian researcher and one of the world's foremost experts on Vitamin D, Dr. Reinhold Vieth, says levels should be in the range of 4,000 IU from all sources.
• Dr. Bowden recommended 2,000 IUs per day.
• Dr. Ziegenfuss personally keeps his levels of 25-hydroxy D at 50 to 100 ng/mL. That means he uses around 4000 IU per day. (He lives in Ohio, by the way.) He notes that when he took 1000 to 2000 IU per day his levels rarely hit 40.
• Bill Roberts has noted that 4,000 IU a day can be a substantial help to fat loss.
• The Vitamin D Council says that those who rarely get sunlight need to supplement with 5,000 IU per day. Note that this would take 50 glasses of fortified milk a day or 10-12 standard multivitamins, hence the need for targeted supplementation.
• Dr. Robert P. Heaney of Nebraska's Creighton University estimates that 3,000 IU per day is required to assure that 97% of Americans obtain levels greater than 35 ng/mL.
So the government says 200 to 400 IU for most of us, but even they admit that's low. Those more in-the-know suggest anywhere from 1000 to even 5000 IU per day.
But this may depend on how much sunlight you get and your ethnicity. Some estimate that dark-skinned individuals, brown and black guys if you will, may need double the amount of D that a pasty white guy needs.
TMUSCLE will leave your personal dosage choice up to you and maybe your physician (if he knows a damn). If you really want to dial this in, we suggest getting tested. (See section below.)
General Recommendations
1) When looking for a Vitamin D supplement, choose the D3 form. Gelcaps are probably best. Liquids are favored by some. Since D is fat soluble, take with foods containing a little fat to optimize absorption. Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids are best.
2) Get some sun when you can, but don't burn. The occasional use of tanning beds is also fine, particularly in the winter.
3) If in doubt, test. The test you want to ask for is 25 (hydroxy) D. That's 25-hydroxyvitamin D, not 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D.
The Vitamin D Council says you should shoot for blood levels between 50—80 ng/mL. The average American in late winter averages about 15 to 18 ng/ml, which would be considered a serious deficiency. Your doctor can give you this test and some home testing kits are available (around $65 each), although we cannot endorse one at this time.
4) It's wise to ensure adequate calcium intake when increasing your intake of Vitamin D.
Can You OD on D?
Yes. But it's unlikely.
Dr. Vieth suggests that critical toxicity may occur at doses of 20,000 IU daily (for many months), and that the Upper Limit (UL) of safety be set at 10,000 IU, rather than the current 2,000 IU.
So while toxicity issues exist, you probably won't have to worry about it when staying at 5000 IU per day or less according to most forward-thinking researchers and nutrition experts.
Good Dope
As we "go to press" I just received another study about Vitamin D from the Public
Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). It seems that Vitamin D may offer protection against Swine Flu, the H1N1 virus.
In short, if you get plenty of Vitamin D and catch the flu, it's a mild illness. If you're lacking — and most people are, especially in the winter — then you're more likely to develop full-blown symptoms.
The message is loud and clear: It's time to start "doping" with Vitamin D.
References and Further Reading
Melamed ML, Michos ED, Post W, Astor B. 25-Hydroxyvitamin D levels and the risk of mortality in the general population. Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(15):1629—37
Autier P, Gandini S. Vitamin D supplementation and total mortality: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(16):1730—7.
http://www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/vitamindmiracle.html
http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp
Athletic Performance and Vitamin D , JOHN J. CANNELL, BRUCE W. HOLLIS, MARC B. SORENSON, TIMOTHY N. TAFT, and JOHN J. B. ANDERSON
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Vitamin-D-linked-to-successful-weight-loss-with-dieting
http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=144&num=229302